Gears of Frisco

Flying over Frisco is unbelievable. Just the sight of it still amazes me, and I've seen
it hundreds of times. If you've ever looked at the insides of one of
those ancient pocket watches they used centuries ago, that's what it
reminds me of. Layer upon layer of intricate gears, wheels and dials,
all interlocking and working together. The striking difference is that
the gears and wheels in Frisco are dozens of kilometers in diameter. The largest disk, the
residential fly-wheel, is nearly 150 kilometers in diameter. It's also
the closest to the ground. It's about 300 meters above the surface of
the land, and it takes close to two years to make a complete revolution
around the central hub.

Above that are smaller
sets of gears and disks that turn faster on hubs set into the spokes of
larger wheels. Most businesses are built on disks that mesh along the
residential gear and make about one revolution per week. Other's
revolve bi-weekly. This reduces transportation needs drastically. A
grocery store may be near your neighborhood every two weeks, while
clothing stores only come around every four weeks. Most restaurants
try and time themselves to be available every two or three days, but
there are lots of them. Of course if you need to get around, there are
plenty of fast-moving transportation gears of different sizes that spin
hourly and daily. Delivery gears swing by retail gears, and oscillate
up and down between supplier wheels and transfer armatures. The
economy is stable because it is built into the machinery of the
clockworks. Most government employees work on slow monthly gears up
high, and near the hub. They may live on the outer rim, but by simply
stepping up onto faster moving gear platforms that pass within walking
distance of any residential neighborhood disk, a person can easily
reach any other location or gear in the city machine. It's simply a
matter of learning the gear reduction ratios.

The
only people not intimately familiar with the gear math are the
farmers. Farms are built on seven massive floating islands that are
attached to the city machine by huge carbon armatures. These floating
islands rise and fall with the tides, and give mechanical motion to the
clockworks of the city. There are people living in small towns on
those farm islands that have never even been to the city. They think
that dweller's in Frisco are crazy for spending their lives spinning around endlessly.

San
Francisco, as they used to call it, was the first city to go mechanical
in a big way. Back when it was still part of the original United
States, they had experimented with using huge tide floats to power the
city, but they were just for electrical power generation. At that
time, no one even considered using the tidal energy directly, to
literally run the city, and the idea of modeling social structure into
the actual design of a machine hadn't even been considered yet. By the
time downtown was devastated for the third time by a massive seismic
event, it was becoming evident that it was impossible to build surface
structures that could withstand those types of forces. So, they
cleared the land; let it go back to nature. The entire bay area land
surface is a now huge wildlife refuge. Even with the city spinning
above it, enough sunshine gets down through the spokes of the massive
round wheels above to keep the forests vibrant and alive. People go
down there to hike and camp now on their vacations. Standing down
there on the ground looking up at the city, it looks like a massively
huge, yet complex and delicate spinning piece of art. It spans as far
as you can see across the sky.

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